Will ChatGPT Build Your Website? Yes — but Only 10% of It
Type “write me a website for a car repair shop” into ChatGPT and a few dozen seconds later you’ll get code. Real, working HTML with styling, and if you ask more specifically — a whole project with subpages, a sensible layout and copy better than what’s on half the business sites in Poland. This is not a con. Language models write frontend code genuinely well today, and anyone who claims otherwise hasn’t checked in a long time.
The trouble starts five minutes later. Because the site’s code is — and we write this as people who build business websites on Amazon’s infrastructure for a living — about 10% of the way to a site that actually exists at a www address, works, collects enquiries and doesn’t fall over in six months. The other 90% is work the chat won’t do for a very mundane reason: it has no hands, no payment card and no access to the admin panels where all of this has to be clicked through.
This piece breaks that 90% down. No scaremongering — ChatGPT is a superb tool, and further down we say plainly when it’s all you need. But if you’re looking for an answer to “will AI build me a site so I never have to think about it again”, it’s worth first seeing the full list of what actually stands between the code and a working website.
What ChatGPT does really well
Let’s start honestly with the upsides, because they’re big.
The chat will write the site’s structure: a header, an offer section, pricing, contact details, a footer. It’ll write it in clean HTML or in whatever framework you ask for. The code will be syntactically correct, responsive if you say so in the prompt, and usually quite decent semantically.
It’ll write the copy too. And here it’s more interesting than people generally assume: if you give it specifics — what the business does, where it operates, what sets it apart — you’ll get content a class above the “we’re committed to quality and a personal approach” that hangs on thousands of sites built by humans. AI writes badly when it’s fed poor inputs. That, as it happens, works exactly the same way with a copywriter.
It’ll advise on the structure of your subpages, suggest keywords worth writing for, explain any technical term you ask about. As a partner for thinking through a website: very good.
So, to sum up honestly: an “AI website” in the sense of code and content — yes, that works. Now let’s see what happens to that code next.
What the chat won’t do, because it has no hands
1. It won’t buy a domain or set up DNS
A site needs an address — yourbusiness.pl. You buy a domain from a registrar, pay by card, and then configure DNS, the mechanism that translates a domain name into a specific server on the internet. In practice: A records, CNAMEs, setting the name servers, and waiting for the changes to propagate across the network (anywhere from a few minutes to a day).
ChatGPT will explain what an A record is. But it won’t log into the registrar’s panel, won’t pay PLN 70 for the domain, and won’t click “save changes” in the DNS zone. A human has to do that — and has to know what they’re clicking, because a misconfigured DNS is a site that works for part of Poland and not for the rest.
2. It won’t set up hosting or a cloud account
The site’s files have to physically live somewhere. Classic hosting, or — the way we do it — the AWS cloud: an account with a card attached, access permissions (IAM), space for the files (S3), a network of servers scattered around the world so the site loads fast from outside Poland too (CloudFront, i.e. a CDN), and an SSL certificate — that padlock next to the address, without which browsers warn “your connection is not secure” and Google drops your ranking.
Each of these is a separate panel, a separate configuration and a separate place to get it wrong. The SSL certificate for Amazon’s CDN infrastructure, for instance, has to be issued in a specific region of their cloud — in another one it simply won’t work, and nobody tells you why until you dig through the documentation. There are dozens of these little quirks. The chat knows them and will happily tell you about them. Click through them for you, it cannot.
3. It won’t upload files to the server or set up automatic publishing
Say the domain is there, the hosting is there. Now the code from the chat window has to get onto the server. That’s what a deploy is for — the process of uploading files, invalidating old versions in the CDN cache, and checking everything came up.
The first time, you can do this by hand. But a business website is alive: you change your opening hours, add a service, fix a typo. Without automation, every such change means another manual upload — and a prayer that you don’t overwrite something you shouldn’t. Done professionally, it works so that every change to the code automatically builds and publishes the site. Setting that up requires an account on a platform like GitHub, connecting it to the cloud, and writing a deployment process. ChatGPT will hand you a ready-made config file. Wiring it in, authenticating and testing it is on you.
4. It won’t build a working form, a cookie banner or analytics
This is the point where most “from-the-chat” sites come apart. Because a brochure website without a contact form is a dead end — and a form isn’t a piece of HTML. A form has to send something: it needs a bit of server-side logic, a configured mail service, a destination inbox and anti-spam protection, because an unprotected form will start getting buried by bots within a week of launch.
Next: if you want to know how many people visit the site and where they come from, you need analytics. And analytics in the European Union means a GDPR-compliant cookie consent banner — and not a rough-and-ready one, but one wired into a mechanism that actually blocks data collection before consent (in the Google ecosystem this is called Consent Mode). The chat will generate the banner code for you. But wiring the banner to your analytics correctly, so that consent really governs what gets collected, is a configuration you have to test on the live site. A badly wired one looks identical to a good one — right up until the first audit.
5. It won’t optimise the site on real hosting or submit it to Google
Code from the chat can look fast on paper. In production, physics kicks in: a photo from a phone weighs 6 MB and needs rescaling and compressing to a modern format, fonts load from external servers and block text from rendering, and Google measures all of this with Core Web Vitals and factors it into rankings. Optimisation is done on the live site, measuring real load times — not in a chat window.
On top of that comes Google Search Console: a free tool where you confirm the domain is yours, submit your sitemap and see which search phrases you show up for. Verifying ownership requires adding a special DNS record or a file on the server. Again: hands, panels, access.
6. It won’t maintain the site
A business website isn’t a sculpture you unveil and walk away from. The SSL certificate expires and has to be renewed. The dependencies the code is built on age — after two years a project that “worked” can fail to build at all. Providers change their pricing and retire old versions of services. And sometimes something just dies at two in the morning and someone has to notice the site isn’t responding before the customers do.
ChatGPT monitors nothing. It gets no notifications, doesn’t get up at night, doesn’t renew certificates. The conversation ends and the chat forgets about your site — literally, that’s not a metaphor.
A real-life scenario: the code is pasted in — now what?
Let’s put it into one story, because taken separately these points sound abstract.
The owner of a cleaning business in Gdańsk sits down with ChatGPT one evening. An hour of conversation, a dozen or so tweaks, and the result really is quite good: a site with an offer, pricing and a nice “why us” section. The chat says “save this as index.html and open it in your browser”. It works. On his laptop.
And that’s the end of the easy part. The site exists as a file on a disk — it has no address, no customer will ever find it. So he asks the chat what’s next, and gets an honest list: buy a domain, choose hosting, configure DNS, upload the files, set up SSL. Every item on that list is a new panel for him, a new account, a new password and new concepts. At DNS he sees the word “propagation” for the first time in his life. At hosting he compares offers he doesn’t know how to compare. The contact form from the chat looks beautiful and sends nothing, because it has no backend — which he finds out a week later, when a friend mentions he wrote in and got no reply.
After three evenings the site is finally up on the internet. No analytics, no cookie banner, with 4 MB photos and a form fixed on the third attempt. Counting honestly: 10–15 hours of work by a man who could have been cleaning offices in that time, i.e. doing the thing he actually earns from. The code — that famous 10% — took an hour of it.
This isn’t a story about a foolish user. It’s a story about how the remaining 90% exists regardless of how good the code was.
What the chat gives you, and what a working site needs
| Element | Will ChatGPT do it? | What’s actually needed |
|---|---|---|
| Site code (HTML, CSS, layout) | Yes, well | — |
| Site copy | Yes, given specific details about the business | inputs from the owner |
| Domain | No | purchase from a registrar, payment, configuration |
| DNS | No (only explains it) | registrar panel, correct records, propagation time |
| Hosting / cloud | No | account, card, S3/CDN or server configuration |
| SSL certificate | No | issuing, wiring in, watching renewals |
| File uploads and auto-publishing changes | No | repository, deploy process, permissions |
| Working contact form | No (front end only) | server backend, mail service, anti-spam |
| GDPR-compliant cookie banner | Partly (code) | wiring to analytics and testing on the live site |
| Analytics | No | account, configuration, consent mode |
| Optimising images, fonts, Core Web Vitals | Partly (advice) | measurements and fixes on real hosting |
| Google Search Console | No | domain ownership verification, sitemap submission |
| Maintenance and monitoring | No | someone who reacts when something breaks |
Two “yes” out of thirteen rows. Both true and both valuable — but that’s precisely the 10%.
When ChatGPT genuinely is enough
There are situations where the answer is: take the chat and don’t look back.
If you’re technical, or want to become technical — the chat plus a good tutorial is the best school for building websites that has ever existed. Concepts that once took weeks on forums, the chat explains in a minute, on your own example, in Polish. Someone who walks the whole path in this article by hand — domain, DNS, hosting, deploy, form — comes out of it with skills companies pay for. If you have the time and it’s fun for you, those dozen-odd hours are well invested.
The chat is also enough for projects that don’t have to “stand” in production: a prototype site to show a business partner, a one-off event page on free hosting, an internal team page. Where there are no customers, no forms and no GDPR, that 90% simply doesn’t exist in full.
And finally: even if someone else is building the site for you, it’s worth talking to the chat before you order. It’ll help you organise what should be on the site and how to describe the business — and that’s the best input there is, whether the builder ends up being an agency, a freelancer or a generator. How those routes compare on price, we laid out in our piece on how much a business website costs.
Sitario, i.e. the same AI — plus the other 90%
Now, openly, about why we know this subject inside out: Sitario does exactly what “the chat that writes a site’s code” does. We use AI to design the layout and write the content for a specific business — for the same reasons ChatGPT does it well. The difference is in all the rest.
Behind the generated code, we have an automated platform that handles every point in that table where it said “no”: it connects the domain and DNS, sets up hosting with a CDN, issues and renews the SSL certificate, launches a contact form with a real backend and anti-spam, configures analytics together with the consent banner, optimises images and fonts, publishes the site and looks after it after launch. For changes after go-live there’s an editing panel — you fix your opening hours yourself, no email to anyone.
From the customer’s point of view it looks like this: a 10-minute form instead of a conversation with the chat, a preview of the finished site to approve — with a money-back guarantee if the result isn’t right for you — and after approval, the site on your domain, PLN 249 with a year of hosting. One button instead of the thirty configuration tabs the cleaning-business owner from Gdańsk went through. We’ve described the details of the whole process on the homepage, and if you’re also weighing the classic route through a provider, you’ll find the comparison in our article on an agency website vs an AI generator.
Back to the question in the title: yes, ChatGPT will build you a website — in that 10% that’s code and text. And it’ll do it well. The question worth asking yourself before your first prompt is a different one: who’s going to do the other 90%, and how much of your time it’ll swallow. If the answer is “me, gladly, I want to learn” — good luck, honestly. If it’s “not me, I’ve got a business to run” — that’s what solutions with the 90% automated are for.